Miami Medical Malpractice Lawyer
You went in for treatment and came out worse, and nobody at the hospital will give you a straight answer about why. We can take it from here. Call 844-643-7200 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Miami personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Miami-Dade County since 1993.
Medical Malpractice claims in Miami
The hospital put its own risk team on it early, and the records you need are held by the people you would be bringing a claim against. Meanwhile you are paying for the care that was supposed to fix the problem, and for the care it now takes to put it right. Finding out what actually happened is our job, and it starts the day you call.
Miami-Dade has the densest concentration of hospitals in the state, and they are not all the same kind of defendant. Jackson Health System operates under the Public Health Trust of Miami-Dade County, which means sovereign immunity, a cap of $200,000 per person and $300,000 per incident, and a written notice of claim that has to be presented before suit. The private systems across the county carry no cap at all. Every malpractice claim here also runs through the Chapter 766 presuit process first: a corroborating affidavit from a medical expert in the same specialty, and a ninety-day investigation window before a complaint can be filed.
A Miami-Dade medical negligence claim runs through Chapter 766 before it can be filed: complete records, a corroborating written opinion from a physician in the relevant specialty, then 90 days notice to each prospective defendant. That work takes months. With the densest concentration of providers in the state, the first task here is establishing which of them actually made the decision.
What to do after a medical malpractice in Miami
- Ask for your complete records, in writing, now. Not the discharge summary and not a portal printout, which is a fraction of the chart. Ask in writing for the complete record: physician and nursing notes, medication administration, vital signs and monitoring, orders, imaging and the reports on it, and laboratory results. You are entitled to it, it is the foundation of any review, and requesting it commits you to nothing.
- Write down the sequence while you still remember it. Who you saw and when, what you told them, what you were told, how long you waited and what changed. Names where you have them. Memory for this fades fast and it fades first for the timings, which is exactly what a review turns on. A family member’s notes made at the bedside are frequently the most useful document in the file.
- Do not sign anything broad. Requests for records are routine and usually fine. Broad authorizations, arbitration agreements and anything resembling a release are not, and they are sometimes presented alongside ordinary paperwork. Bring the document to somebody before signing it. Reading it costs nothing, and an arbitration agreement signed at a bedside can decide the case before it starts.
- Keep getting care, from somebody else if you need to. Nothing about a potential claim requires you to stay with a provider you no longer trust, and nothing about changing doctors damages a claim. What does damage one is a gap in treatment, because it becomes the argument that the harm resolved. Get the problem addressed and let the records of that treatment be made.
- Ask early, because this claim cannot be started late. A medical case cannot simply be filed. The records have to be gathered and reviewed by a qualified physician who is willing to corroborate the claim in writing, and only then does the formal notice go out. That work takes months and costs real money before anything is filed. The practical deadline is therefore a long way ahead of the legal one.
Where these happen in Miami
Miami-Dade has more hospitals, more specialists and more licensed facilities than any county in Florida, and a patient’s care frequently passes through several of them. The harm is often in the space between.
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Office-based and cosmetic surgery
The county has a large office surgery sector, operating under rules that are meaningfully different from a hospital’s.
- Office surgery registration and the procedures a facility is actually permitted to perform
- Anesthesia and monitoring standards, and who was watching the patient during recovery
- Transfer arrangements for a patient who deteriorates, and how long an ambulance actually took
- The distinction between the clinic, the surgeon and the corporate entity behind both, which is rarely one company
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The referral chain between specialists
A patient here may see four providers in three organizations for one problem, and each assumes another is holding the thread.
- A result produced correctly and never communicated to the patient or the referring physician
- Follow-up recommended in a report and never acted on by anybody
- Records held by several organizations, so no single chart shows the sequence
- The failure that only becomes visible once the whole timeline is assembled in one place
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Consent, and the language it was taken in
A large share of patients in this county are more comfortable in Spanish or Creole, and consent is a conversation rather than a signature.
- Whether an interpreter was used, and whether the record says so
- What risks were actually explained, as against what the form lists
- Documents signed on the day of a procedure, when nobody is in a position to read them
- Arbitration agreements presented alongside ordinary paperwork, which are worth reading before signing
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Dialysis, infusion and outpatient treatment
Long-running outpatient treatment produces a long record, which is an advantage once somebody reads all of it.
- Access site infections and the delay in recognizing them
- Dosing and medication administration recorded session by session
- Monitoring during treatment, and the response when observations changed
- Facility policies and staffing ratios, which are documented and something we can get
What causes them
- A heart attack or a stroke sent home from an emergency department as something else
- Sepsis missed while a patient was in front of somebody, which is the most preventable death in a hospital
- A deteriorating patient whose observations were charted and not escalated to anybody who could act
- Surgery on the wrong site or the wrong side, and instruments or sponges left behind
- Anesthesia errors, including airway management and monitoring during and after a procedure
The injuries we see, and what each one turns on
Brain injury from oxygen deprivation
Airway and monitoring failures, cardiac arrest that was not responded to quickly enough, and delivery complications all produce the same category of injury. It is frequently catastrophic and permanent, and the claim becomes a life care case rather than a medical bills case, priced from decades of attendant care rather than from what has already been spent.
Sepsis and what it leaves behind
People survive sepsis and are not the same afterward. Amputation, kidney failure requiring dialysis, and a cognitive and physical decline that does not reverse are all common outcomes, and the treatment involved is measured in months. The negligence is usually not a wrong decision but a slow one, which is proved from the timings in the chart.
Surgical injury and the operations that follow it
A perforation, a nerve injury or a failed repair generally means a further operation, sometimes several, and a recovery far longer than the one that was described beforehand. The second surgeon’s records are frequently where the picture becomes clear, because they document what was actually found.
What Florida law requires you to prove
The presuit process, in order
A medical negligence suit cannot be filed in Florida until the presuit requirements of Chapter 766 have been met. The records are gathered and reviewed, and a qualified medical expert in the relevant specialty has to provide a verified written opinion corroborating that there are reasonable grounds, under Fla. Stat. § 766.203. Only then does written notice of intent go to each prospective defendant, and under Fla. Stat. § 766.106 no suit may be filed for 90 days after that. The limitations period is tolled during the window, and both sides investigate informally within it.
The deadlines, which run differently here
Medical negligence has its own limitations rules under Fla. Stat. § 95.11: generally two years from when the injury was discovered or should have been discovered with due diligence, and in no event more than four years from the incident itself, with narrow exceptions including concealment and a separate provision for young children. Because the investigation and the corroborating opinion have to be completed before notice can even be sent, the working deadline sits well inside the statutory one.
Two things that surprise people
The modified comparative negligence bar Florida adopted in 2023, which stops anybody more than 50 percent responsible from recovering, expressly does not apply to medical negligence claims under Chapter 766. Separately, Article X, Section 25 of the Florida Constitution gives patients a right of access to records of adverse medical incidents made or received by a health care facility or provider. It is an unusually powerful right, it is underused, and it is one of the first requests we make.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide medical malpractice page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Miami-Dade County
Because care here is spread across organizations, the first piece of work is assembling one timeline from several records. That is usually where the negligence becomes visible, and it is not visible in any single chart.
- The complete chart from every organization involved, not only the one a patient assumes is at fault
- The actual imaging files rather than the reports on them, so they can be read again independently
- The electronic record audit trail, showing access, timing and anything added after the fact
- Records of adverse medical incidents, which patients have a constitutional right of access to in Florida
- Referral and results communication records, which is where a delayed diagnosis case is usually won
- Facility licensing and registration, including what procedures a site was permitted to perform
- Policies, protocols, staffing rosters and assignment sheets for the date in question
- Interpreter and consent documentation where the conversation was not held in the patient’s first language
That assembled timeline then goes to a physician in the relevant specialty for a written review before anything is filed, at the firm’s expense. If the review does not support a claim, we say so rather than carrying the case along.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in Miami is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled medical malpractice claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
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Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Brett Yonon is who this firm puts on a catastrophic injury or a death in the family, and he has tried those cases to verdict. Full profile → -
Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile →
How insurance companies handle these claims
Medical files are not handled by an ordinary adjuster. There is generally a risk manager involved from the day the incident is reported internally, frequently before the patient has any idea something went wrong, and counsel is assigned early.
- A sympathetic call from risk management, early
- The conversation is genuine and the person making it is also gathering information. Anything said in it is recorded somewhere. There is no obligation to give an account of what happened to the institution you may have a claim against, and no harm at all in saying that you are not discussing it yet.
- The records arrive incomplete
- What comes back to a patient request is frequently the summary layer rather than the chart. Nursing notes, medication administration records, monitoring strips, order histories and the actual imaging files rather than the reports on them all have to be asked for specifically. The electronic record also keeps an audit trail showing who opened what and when, and whether anything was added after the fact, which we can check, and sometimes it is.
- You signed a consent form
- A consent form documents that risks were discussed. It is not a waiver of negligent care and it never has been. Consenting to the recognized risks of an operation is not consenting to it being performed on the wrong side, or to a complication going unrecognized for two days afterward.
What a claim can include
Medical care, past and future
Everything already billed and what the treating physicians say is still ahead. In a catastrophic case the future is the claim, and it is quantified by a professional rather than estimated.
Lost income and lost earning capacity
Wages missed, and separately what somebody can no longer earn. Where the injured person is a child, the loss is an entire working life and is calculated by an economist.
Pain, and what daily life has become
What was lost in function, independence and time, proved with treating records and with the account of the people around the injured person.
Why Wolf & Pravato in Miami
A Miami-Dade medical negligence case is filed in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, and the firm has an office on Brickell Avenue rather than a mailing address in the county. We work with clients in Spanish and English, which in this practice is not a courtesy but part of the evidence: what somebody was told, and in which language, is frequently the question.
The firm is led by a Board Certified Civil Trial lawyer, a certification held by 861 attorneys in Florida against a membership over 109,000. Insurance companies keep their own records of which firms in a county actually try cases, and that record moves an offer further than anything a firm can say about itself.
There is no charge to ask. Our fee comes out of what we recover and nowhere else, and if the answer is that you do not have a case, that is the answer you will get.
Miami medical malpractice questions
The consent conversation happened in English and I understood very little of it.
That is worth examining rather than accepting. Consent is a discussion of the risks and alternatives, not a signature on a form, and whether an interpreter was used is something the record should show. A gap between what was said, what was understood and what the document states is a real issue in a claim. Bring us anything you signed, and we would rather see the paperwork than hear a summary of it.
It happened at a clinic rather than a hospital. Does that change anything?
It changes what rules applied and who the defendant is. Office surgery facilities operate under registration requirements covering which procedures may be performed, what anesthesia may be used and what monitoring and transfer arrangements have to be in place. Whether a facility met them is a question of fact and is frequently the case itself. The clinic, the surgeon and the company behind them are also rarely a single entity.
How long do I have to bring a Miami malpractice claim?
Generally two years from when you knew or should have known the injury was caused by malpractice, and in no event more than four years from the incident itself, with narrow exceptions. The presuit process consumes part of that, since the notice of intent triggers a 90-day period before suit can be filed. The investigation and the physician review have to be finished before that notice goes out, which is why waiting until the deadline is close is what makes these claims impossible to take on.
Do I need a medical expert before I can sue?
Yes. Chapter 766 requires a corroborating written opinion from a qualified medical expert that there are reasonable grounds to believe negligence occurred. That review happens at our expense during the presuit investigation, and if the expert does not support the claim, we tell you so.
The hospital asked me to sign something. Should I?
Not before someone reads it. Requests for records are routine and usually fine, but broad authorizations, arbitration agreements and anything resembling a release are not. Bring the document to us before signing; reading it costs you nothing.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
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Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 1111 Brickell Avenue, 11th Floor, Miami, FL 33131.